The cybersecurity fail-safe

The huge increase in home and hybrid work­ing over the past two years means that CIOs and CISOs have re-eval­u­at­ed secu­ri­ty poli­cies and are look­ing to bol­ster end­point secu­ri­ty. It’s lit­tle won­der that Gart­ner Group report that 61% of CIOs of organ­i­sa­tions plan to increase spend­ing on cyber and infor­ma­tion secu­ri­ty this year.

It’s turned out to be a big­ger project than expect­ed. Accord­ing to a sur­vey of 750 IT deci­sion mak­ers car­ried out by Tani­um, 82% of CISOs said that they were over­haul­ing end­point secu­ri­ty, but 94% were faced with end­points that were either unpro­tect­ed or over­loaded with con­flict­ing soft­ware agents. As many as one in five end­points were dis­cov­ered to be vul­ner­a­ble to attack.

Organ­i­sa­tions are expe­ri­enc­ing more attacks than ever before. Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty Ven­tures notes that ran­somware attacks on busi­ness­es occur every 11 sec­onds. All the while, busi­ness­es expe­ri­enced a 50% increase in week­ly cyber­at­tacks in 2021.

Cyber crim­i­nals are also becom­ing more tar­get­ed in their attacks. Microsoft’s recent ‘Dig­i­tal Defence Report’ stat­ed that threat actors have rapid­ly increased in sophis­ti­ca­tion over the past year, using tech­niques that make them hard­er to spot, and which threat­en even the most sea­soned IT secu­ri­ty team. Crim­i­nal groups tar­get­ing busi­ness­es have moved infra­struc­ture to the cloud, where they can hide among legit­i­mate cloud ser­vices, and attack­ers have devel­oped new ways to scan the inter­net for sys­tems vul­ner­a­ble to ran­somware.

This mas­sive growth in the num­ber and com­plex­i­ty of attacks, com­bined with a glob­al short­age of IT secu­ri­ty pro­fes­sion­als, is a big prob­lem for busi­ness­es.

Some­thing needs to change
End­point secu­ri­ty com­pa­ny Tani­um says there is a fun­da­men­tal prob­lem in how most organ­i­sa­tions approach end­point secu­ri­ty man­age­ment. As the num­ber of IT secu­ri­ty threats increas­es expo­nen­tial­ly, com­pa­nies often respond by buy­ing anoth­er point solu­tion. In the last year, 90% of organ­i­sa­tions have bought at least one new IT secu­ri­ty point solu­tion, and almost half (45%) have bought at least four new prod­ucts, accord­ing to the Foundry ‘Secu­ri­ty Pri­or­i­ties Study.’ A typ­i­cal enter­prise now has 43 sep­a­rate IT secu­ri­ty and secu­ri­ty man­age­ment tools in its infra­struc­ture.

This approach sim­ply isn’t sus­tain­able. When busi­ness­es add more tools to their infra­struc­ture, they don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly increase their pro­tec­tion, because the pace with which new threats emerge is faster than most organ­i­sa­tions can keep up with. This is espe­cial­ly true in today’s high­ly dis­trib­uted organ­i­sa­tions. There’s also some evi­dence that the effec­tive­ness of some point solu­tions is falling; accord­ing to one recent report in the New York Times, the first detec­tion rates of some antivirus tools has fall­en below five per­cent.

Then there’s the issue of keep­ing up with a pro­lif­er­a­tion of point solu­tions, each with its own data, inter­face and own­er. Per­haps one tool is man­aged by IT oper­a­tions and reports into one data silo dai­ly, but anoth­er is man­aged by com­pli­ance and reports quar­ter­ly into anoth­er data silo. If that sce­nario is repeat­ed 40 times, that’s an exam­ple of the data headache that CIOs and CISOs are fac­ing.

This patch­work approach can­not pro­vide com­plete pro­tec­tion, and it can be active­ly harm­ful to cor­po­rate secu­ri­ty efforts. If an organ­i­sa­tion has mul­ti­ple secu­ri­ty tools sit­ting in mul­ti­ple silos, CIOs can’t get a clear overview of how many end­points there are, much less how effec­tive­ly they are pro­tect­ed, and what changes need to be made.

In many ways, secu­ri­ty is a data vis­i­bil­i­ty prob­lem. When an organ­i­sa­tion is run­ning dozens of sys­tems, and dozens of IT secu­ri­ty solu­tions, each gen­er­at­ing huge vol­umes of data at dif­fer­ent rates, how is that data being inte­grat­ed and under­stood? Sim­ply put, com­pa­nies can’t pro­tect what they can’t see.

Today’s secu­ri­ty deci­sion-mak­ers need help. They need a plat­form that helps them to keep up with a pro­lif­er­a­tion of end­points, and to under­stand exact­ly how each one is per­form­ing, the threats posed to it, and how it can be pro­tect­ed. This infor­ma­tion needs to be avail­able in one place, and in real-time. Only then can CIOs cre­ate a sin­gle view of secu­ri­ty that is need­ed to deliv­er effec­tive pro­tec­tion and cre­ate a strat­e­gy that pri­ori­tis­es the right things at the right time.

What’s need­ed is a con­verged solu­tion.

Just how bad are things out there?
Tani­um spoke with hun­dreds of IT secu­ri­ty deci­sion mak­ers who said they want a way to reduce and sim­pli­fy end­point secu­ri­ty man­age­ment.

Key chal­lenges that organ­i­sa­tions face in man­ag­ing end­point secu­ri­ty include siloed teams, espe­cial­ly in IT oper­a­tions and secu­ri­ty, that aren’t able to share secu­ri­ty data quick­ly or effec­tive­ly. Despite this, many busi­ness lead­ers feel a false sense of con­fi­dence about their pro­tec­tion. Sec­ond, poor vis­i­bil­i­ty of secu­ri­ty data leaves net­works vul­ner­a­ble to attack. Some 64% of busi­ness­es expect to expe­ri­ence a cyber attack in the next 12 months.

This lack of vis­i­bil­i­ty and frag­ment­ed approach puts com­pa­nies at risk of finan­cial loss­es, down­time, dam­aged brand rep­u­ta­tion and poten­tial heavy fines for non-com­pli­ance. This is a huge con­cern giv­en that 20.4% of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties that are dis­cov­ered with­in busi­ness­es are classed as high or crit­i­cal risk. It also takes an aver­age of 61.4 days to reme­di­ate a crit­i­cal risk, accord­ing to Edges­can, pre­sent­ing a huge secu­ri­ty risk to organ­i­sa­tions.

End­point secu­ri­ty man­age­ment must be a high­er pri­or­i­ty for busi­ness lead­ers. In a recent Har­vard Busi­ness Review sur­vey, 70% of busi­ness lead­ers said they thought that lead­er­ship should be more con­cerned about cyber­se­cu­ri­ty.

A new approach to end­point secu­ri­ty man­age­ment
“It’s crys­tal clear that busi­ness­es need a new approach to end­point man­age­ment that helps us to keep pace with tomorrow’s threats,” says Steve Daheb, CMO at Tani­um. The rea­son why so many enter­pris­es fall vic­tim to ran­somware attacks is that the tools they use are no match for the sophis­ti­ca­tion of attack­ers: tools are slow, unre­li­able and lack a com­mon dataset to oper­ate from. And they inher­ent­ly cre­ate silos.

This approach to secu­ri­ty isn’t work­ing. It’s time to unite tools and data with a uni­fied solu­tion: con­verged end­point man­age­ment (XEM).

Intro­duc­ing con­verged end­point man­age­ment (XEM)
Tani­um takes a uni­fied approach to IT secu­ri­ty man­age­ment. Its plat­form com­bines mul­ti­ple end­point tools and data so that organ­i­sa­tions can have vis­i­bil­i­ty and real-time data on all end­points, through a sin­gle inter­face.

“Unlike tra­di­tion­al, frag­ment­ed approach­es to end­point man­age­ment, XEM max­imis­es vis­i­bil­i­ty, con­trol and trust, and allows teams to inter­act with all end­points in sec­onds, regard­less of the scale and com­plex­i­ty of the IT envi­ron­ment,” says Daheb.

XEM pro­vides accu­rate, real-time data to sup­port end-to-end automa­tion, so infor­ma­tion secu­ri­ty teams can align their efforts and pro­tect their organ­i­sa­tions against attacks more effec­tive­ly. With a uni­fied approach, there’s no need for staff from IT oper­a­tions, com­pli­ance, secu­ri­ty and numer­ous oth­er siloes to spend hours col­lat­ing and shar­ing data. It can be viewed in a sin­gle inter­face, mean­ing IT secu­ri­ty teams can do more with less resources.

Lega­cy man­age­ment sys­tems are often at the heart of prob­lems for organ­i­sa­tions look­ing to improve vis­i­bil­i­ty and effi­cien­cy. Mov­ing to a con­verged plat­form gives back count­less hours of man­age­ment time, allow­ing com­pa­nies to allo­cate head­count else­where and address dan­ger­ous vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties more quick­ly and effec­tive­ly across the whole organ­i­sa­tion.

The case for bet­ter data
IT lead­ers can’t make effec­tive deci­sions about secu­ri­ty with­out the right vis­i­bil­i­ty into data across their infra­struc­ture. XEM pro­vides real-time infor­ma­tion from every sin­gle end­point, so that crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion isn’t locked in siloes, accessed by dif­fer­ent teams using dif­fer­ent tools.

By con­verg­ing tools into a sin­gle inter­face, com­pa­nies can focus on actu­al­ly deliv­er­ing effec­tive secu­ri­ty. With XEM, organ­i­sa­tions can eas­i­ly see, assess and man­age all their IT secu­ri­ty data in a sin­gle view. Data can be shared, allow­ing for more effec­tive col­lab­o­ra­tion and eas­i­er, more cost-effec­tive man­age­ment. Ulti­mate­ly, a con­verged approach pro­vides reli­able, time­ly insight that can be used to dri­ve bet­ter, faster deci­sion-mak­ing. That’s essen­tial in today’s fast-mov­ing threat land­scape.

Pro­vid­ing effec­tive gov­er­nance
IT gov­er­nance is a top pri­or­i­ty for many CIOs but when it comes to secu­ri­ty, it can be almost impos­si­ble to achieve. Organ­i­sa­tions have mul­ti­ple teams with respon­si­bil­i­ty for IT secu­ri­ty, includ­ing com­pli­ance, gov­er­nance, IT oper­a­tions, secu­ri­ty and risk. These teams are often work­ing in iso­la­tion from each oth­er, so there’s no vis­i­bil­i­ty of organ­i­sa­tion-wide threats.

“With­out col­lab­o­ra­tion or vis­i­bil­i­ty about organ­i­sa­tion-wide risks, enter­pris­es can devel­op blind spots, mak­ing both secu­ri­ty and com­pli­ance a chal­lenge. If you don’t have vis­i­bil­i­ty into all your end­points, it’s almost impos­si­ble to enforce access poli­cies and main­tain con­trol across your IT infra­struc­ture,” Daheb says.

The good news is that fix­ing these blind spots doesn’t need to be a com­plex, time-con­sum­ing process. XEM pro­vides a rel­a­tive­ly quick solu­tion to exist­ing chal­lenges, increas­ing effi­cien­cy and effec­tive­ness by reduc­ing unnec­es­sary com­plex­i­ty and improv­ing vis­i­bil­i­ty of your IT assets. Daheb adds: “Tanium’s plat­form approach means that every­thing you need – from risk and com­pli­ance to data mon­i­tor­ing and more – is accom­plished in a sin­gle solu­tion. We can iden­ti­fy where all your data is in a mat­ter of sec­onds, mean­ing that you can deploy secu­ri­ty tools across all end­points, with a sin­gle con­trol plane and com­mon data set and tax­on­o­my.”

Mak­ing a dif­fer­ence
Daheb says: “Tanium’s XEM offer­ing is the only solu­tion that allows teams to col­lec­tive­ly per­form detailed and com­plete dis­cov­ery, in-depth assess­ments, enter­prise pri­ori­ti­sa­tion, cross-plat­form reme­di­a­tion, and con­tin­u­ous vig­i­lance every­where.”

XEM-based approach­es to end­point secu­ri­ty allow organ­i­sa­tions to deliv­er con­ver­gence of IT oper­a­tions and secu­ri­ty, as well as the secu­ri­ty infra­struc­tures that are based on point solu­tions. The Tani­um plat­form aims to change the mar­ket and meet the twin chal­lenges of spi­ralling cyber­se­cu­ri­ty threats and ris­ing com­plex­i­ty of end­point secu­ri­ty man­age­ment.
With­out XEM, the indus­try will inevitably see more breach­es, more attacks, more data leaks and more prob­lems. It’s time to make a change.

Learn more about con­verged end­point man­age­ment (XEM) — vis­it tanium.com/converged-endpoint-management

Pro­mot­ed by Tani­um